


lilith, eve, and the overripe universal

by lesblep



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Child Neglect, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Marriage Proposal, Parenthood, author did not read both epilogues or hs2 and they can't be bothered, everything comes to an end eventually, it's sad but like in the back of your mind, or maybe it's not canon compliant. who knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26342545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesblep/pseuds/lesblep
Summary: Rose, Kanaya, and five thousand years is enough to make a pretty big mess of things. The betweens of marriage and romance, with bonus commentary from lives unlived.
Relationships: Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Kudos: 11





	lilith, eve, and the overripe universal

**Author's Note:**

> I interrupt  
> the invisible universal  
> which denies men their souls  
> and women their being  
> -Lilith’s Dance, Michelene Wandor
> 
> I'm talking blood on grass  
> an overripe suburbanite heartattack  
> and paint all black  
> because the end is accellerating back to  
> the beginning and everyone is falling in line  
> -Lilith/Eve, Machines of Loving Grace

Shit's recursive, is the thing. Take two young women who grew up with a vague concept of motherhood and an odd sense of responsibility for literally everyone they've ever met, and _of course_ they'll end up finding each other. And pissing each other off, but in this case, dear reader, they pissed each other off hard enough that it feedback looped around again and built a half-decade love story.

Rose raises her muffin in the idea of the direction of the most recent mutant kitten her daughter-mother-paradox-sister's defrosted. "Cheers," she says, upending it with all the grace of a recovering alcoholic, muscle memory (it's not a glass, it's a handful of pastry, Rosey darling) and gets crumbs all down her shirt. The kitten squeaks an eldritch syllable, hopping off the bookshelf and into her lap. “Again, here,” Rose tells it, reaching into her bra with one hand and petting it with the other, “have I thoroughly fucked up my life, but this time with cinnamon flavouring.”

“Rose,” comes a voice, “ _what_ are you doing.” It’s quite Kanaya, and it isn’t quite a question. She puts her hands on her hips, segmented and jade-tinged. She’s draped herself in black today, deep and starsung, with a wirewoven corset the same material as the gauntlets she’s donned. She looks like if Ancient Rome spat on the idea of protective armor.

“You look stunning,” replies Rose, who is by name and right a goddess, cursed visionary and wand-wielder, but still technically a teenager who spent three years pining after someone she was already dating. She slowly draws her hand out of her shirt and offers it to her girlfriend. “Would you like some muffin?”

Once upon a slithering vague timeline, Kanaya was less of a child and more of a hero, and when she died on the meteor, she died not protecting the Matriorb out of misplaced teenage hope but duty- vicious triangular fate and all the strings that went with it- and when it was shot dead by a burnished festering diamond, so too did he shoot dead the way she quirked her mouth when she spoke. Kanaya is only alive today because she was selfish enough to claw her way out of the Furthest Ring to see the boy who killed her dead in turn. She would’ve stayed Kanaya, unfanged, if she didn’t develop such a strong love for her formless spiky basketball of a lusus soon to be reborn.

“Flatterer,” she says instead of _thank you for sculpting me petty so I could’ve died a second time for revenge,_ “but weren’t you supposed to be misting the eggs?” She sinks to her girlfriend’s level, pats the mutated purrbeast when it crawls up to hook itself over the arch of her shoulders like a pleasantly vibrating scarf.

Rose brushes her hands off against the suspenders she’s commandeered from who-knows-where and pulls an egg from her sylladex. “I did,” she says, “there’s only this one left.”

“We lost them again?” Kanaya’s ears drop, entire jaw buzzing with a confused urge to drain the embryo to bring it back- that’s not how rainbow drinking works and she knows it- “I thought we figured out the formula by now.”

“The other jades won’t let me ectobiologise them more,” Rose says, “so this little fucker is all we have left in this batch.”

“I’ll have to speak with the Mothergrub, then,” Kanaya makes as if to stand up and have a Stern Talking To with the moody larva she and hers have a symbiotic relationship with, but Rose brings her back down with only a look. The egg thrums something happy, and she takes it gentle in both palms. It glows a faint cerulean, and she wonders offhandedly if any other jades saw this. “Oh,” says Kanaya. “Hello, little one.”

“Vriska,” Rose tells the egg firmly, rounding her tongue to match the importance. "She's a hero, whether or not she deserves that."

“You don’t even know if she's alive and you’re naming our kid after her?” Kanaya curls her lengthy everything into her rather shorter girlfriend’s side.

“Yep. Besides, we make the rules now, and my first rule is that everyone gets a badass name. My second rule is that we get some sleep because you look dead on your feet.”

“I’m not on my feet, currently,” snarks Kanaya, and gets a solid smack of a kiss for her trouble.

“Sleep.” Rose scoops the egg from her girlfriend’s grasp, holds it careful until it pops back into her inventory, and arm in silent arm the two unwind each other. The halls of the Mothergrub Caverns are mostly empty. They sing shadow, a set amount of preexisting trolls, but when the credits rolled-

-well. When the credits rolled they weren't supposed to take back this duty. They won. Goddesses are supposed to lounge on their accolades and be fed grapes and dripping nectar. Instead, they’ve fucked up an entire society for five thousand years trying to repair a life cycle. Somewhere in the coiled depths of the Mothergrub's many holistic sphincters, something is rotting. This one isn't the lusus she knew, void-born and unhurried, and Kanaya can't help but feel selfish in her grief.

***

Kanaya is screaming. To be fair, there’s something else screaming, something tiny and skittering and covered in its own sick, but Rose blasts a palmful of flame through the wall trying to combat her lack of nightvision. “AAAAAAAAAAAUGH,” Kanaya explains eloquently. In her hands clutched to her windpipe is a tiny demon, dripping ooze and jade-blood, and Rose’s first thought is that her horns look an awful lot like crochet hooks. 

Her second thought is _holy shit we hatched a grub,_ and with a disdainful chirp she snatches and holds it up to her face. Little Vriska has a mouthful of blood for her first meal, and Rose pecks its head between the horns. “Hello,” she says, tickling its insectoid limbs with one fingertip. The grub hisses like the rude little shit she’s quickly establishing herself to be. 

Kanaya heaves over the side of their bed in reply. The vestigial gills on the edges of her jaw flutter madding, alien simulacrum to those plants that shrunk away when you stroked a leaf.

“Gross,” says the childish bit of her. “Are you alright, my love?” Says the other.

Rose is reminded with a pang, after cleaning up Kanaya and Vriska (maybe the name was a mistake) and the eggshell, of a mop in clumsy middle-school hands and a shattered martini glass meeting bare feet, hello little one, have you considered having a few less toes. Those scars were taken from her when she reached god-body, and whether or not that is a loss is still being taken into account. She stitched her own damn self up and it was unfair that her mother got to lie on the cooling carpet angry enough to pass out and that tiny Rosebud was doing all this and she didn’t even get a thank you in the morning because _somebody_ , pronounce the italics with appropriate toothy spite, didn’t remember anything about last night. You cannot begrudge a child bride for the shattered womb. You cannot begrudge a child bride for purposeful ruin, everything her father-mentor tinged in his descent from brilliant scientist to muted necrophile. Rose considers herself lucky that Jacob Harley is not a person who exists in this timeline, because if she ever met him, there'd be a high chance of him getting rent limb from limb so he couldn't touch Roxy, intentions or otherwise. 

(She also considers Joey Claire and Jude Harley lucky in that they'll never be raised in a taxidermied house, or raised at all.)

“Thank you,” says Kanaya, and reaches out for the grub while she slumps sitting further into their ablution trap. She sticks out a forked tongue at Vriska, who does her best to be threatening while flapping her tiny half-webbed limbs, and Rose? 

Rose smiles.

“She’s going to challenge you for dominance every chance she gets,” she says, and Kanaya stops rubbing her chin over the grub’s face like a cat to reflect the dimming lamp in her secondary eyelids. Vriska takes this chance to nip at her, teeth needling. “How sweet.”

***

They start with their closest friends, meaning Dave and Karkat, with Jade thrown in for flavour. Three years on a meteor, surprisingly, does a lot for building a community.

Harley herself ends up being the biggest supporter. Jade scoops the child into the crook of one arm, and taps her black-lipped snout with the end of a rifle like a Very Responsible Adult. Vriska chirps, wriggling her graspers at it like any self respecting Alternian would, and there's a pleased hum coming from both of them, radiating something lime-tinged and merciful. “This troll is going to be the best of everything her caste offered. High enough blood that there'll be hell to pay, but low enough that she doesn't have to think about things like chucklevoodoos. On the other frond," says Harley, "this means the Serket bloodline really isn't gone,” and Kanaya isn't sure how to feel about that. “I'm like ninety percent sure she's a true Scorpio,” Jade expands, capitalising old knowledge from her time as a sprite, “just like her namesake!” and the only person who even vaguely gets what she's expositing is Karkat. What a guy. “Auntie Jade's gonna teach you to shoot when you pupate opposable thumbs,” she says, drawing one of her ectosibling’s pistols as if to gift, and with that Kanaya deigns to take her kid back.

“I'm glad you'll be assuring the next generation will be able to protect themselves,” she says, “but maybe don't teach them the same way you were taught? Innocent mosaicwingbeasts don't deserve to be in the line of fire.”

“That's fair, actually,” says Jade, and she smooches the grubling before winking out of her neighbours’ hive, presumably off to heckle her brother. “Bye, everyone!”

Dave, to his own surprise, doesn't immediately drop and-slash-or murder the baby troll when she's handed to him, and his expression goes soft and curious, and Vriska scuttles into his shirt, revelling in the curve of his throat. She scrapes a quick pink line against his face with her tiny horns, and he grins, a flash of white against brown, a fragile thing coaxed out. “She's mine now,” he decides, “sorry Rose.”

Rose squashes her brother and her daughter into a hug. “You're not stealing my alien baby."

“Yes, I am.”

“No, you're not.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Kanaya purrs, an anglerfish of a jawline, and tucks her best friend under one arm, who has had his fill of children for now. (Here's the thing- Maryam is the name of a bloodline that was born to facilitate birth. If she had had her way, she would've turned right around after first pupating and helping her hatchmates scramble out of their own cocoons.)

In his own defence, Karkat is definitely attempting to make a break for it.

***

"We should probably get married," Rose says, sprawled out across the kitchen bench with her grub mostly ensconced in her hair.

"Why?" Kanaya replies. Her hands are grey and calloused and dusted with flour, and Rose knows them intimately, the tiny white nicks from where she's gnawed, nervous, on where her thumb meets the palm.

_Good point_ , says the throat-itch. _Ah, but consider-_

"I want to," Rose interrupts the frustration of her own damn head, "I _want_ to." The grub chirps something inimitable, and Kanaya sits down beside her girlfriend, opens a palm in offer.

A ring sits there, gold for the grey, gold for the brown, gold for the white. It's thin enough that she almost misses the way the gem follows the curve. "Even in a million years," Kanaya says, "when they find my skeleton crumbling into sand, made up of eons of forgetting, I will still love you the same way I always have. It's engraved into my body right now, and will be in what's left of it, a permanent blazing truth."

_She was waiting for you._

Rose takes it, hand folding over itself, ring trapped within the fragile cage of skin and bone and tendon, then grins. "My wedding vows are going to be blasphemy, darling."

**Author's Note:**

> this was a big bang piece and the bang fell apart and i forgot about it. anyway here ya go. you know where to find me.


End file.
